Winning Businesses Are Tapping Into the Power of Social

Social is a force that can empower businesses to connect, innovate, create value, and solve real problems in real time. For businesses, information flow is changing from a top-down model, where media outlets and brands have the dominant voice, to a more democratic model, where the dominant voice is held by communities of customers and employees. Wherever they are, so is your business.

As I see it, there are three points to consider on your path to becoming a social business:

I. Social is the New Production Line

Social media has had a sweeping impact on human interaction, fundamentally changing how we engage with one another. The touchpoints of business are no longer contained within brick and mortar, but extend beyond the enterprise through a connected network of your clients, your products, and your workforce.

A social business connects people so they can work together to create value – share ideas, innovate, solve problems. In fact, social business is becoming the new standard expectation of how employees and customers interact with organizations. A social business will support social engagement within the organization and drive more relevant, engaging customer experiences.

II. Social is the New Intelligence for Business

Social is providing a new human face to data. Social data gives you a wealth of insight to improve individual connections and information sharing, to create opportunities for collaboration and innovation, and to see trends earlier. Whether social interactions are occurring inside or outside of your organization, you have a new natural resource in social data that can be mined for competitive advantage.

Winning businesses in the era of social business will harness social data and analytics throughout their enterprises to improve employee and customer experience and tap into the power of collective intelligence to drive innovation.

III. Social is the Future of How Modern Enterprises Work

Social interaction between people is increasingly the way work gets done in the modern enterprise. Benefiting from social centricity requires a strategic approach that looks at each element of your business operating model – including the processes, people, and technologies that span the value chain – to identify the biggest opportunities to reduce cost, increase speed, and leverage new sources of information to innovate.

Social business is about harnessing these dynamics to unleash innovation across all the touchpoints, transforming your people, your product, and your client experience for greater value.

About the author:

Tami Cannizzaro is responsible for driving IBM’s Social Business initiative, which helps companies to improve sales, marketing, and workforce productivity by building social into the fabric of their organizations. Her stated mission is to help IBM become the number one social business in the world and to help clients become socially forward businesses. Tami has a passion for digital marketing and speaks internationally on the topics of digital marketing and social business. She writes a blog for marketers www.digitalageofmarketing.com.